Invent

backlinks - SEO & Social Media Marketing

Kindle & Leapfish – the times they are a changing!

Kindle News & Press Release

kindle seo book Kindle & Leapfish the times they are a changing!In my previous post I broke the news that my book was now available in the Kindle bookstore. Whoa, I really should have done this sooner, sales have been surprisingly brisk and some great reviews are starting to come in. A special thank you to all who purchased my book.

Amazon sells almost 200 Kindle books for every 100 print books, which should be an important message for every author.  Amazon is the world’s largest book seller and the Kindle is the #1 selling product on Amazon, it is easy to conclude that your book belongs on Kindle.

So what took me so long to get my Kindle act together?  Quite honestly, it was the time required to reformat the book. Kindle has special formatting requirements and I just put it off due to time constraints. In hindsight, that was a mistake so learn from me.

The Press Release announcing this Kindle news came out today. See, “SEO & Social Media Book Released as Kindle Edition, Price Slashed” on this website or on PR Web.

Leapfish Folds Their Tent

Leapfish ‘was’ an interesting company and a unique resource for web marketers. In fact, I recommended them in my book, the “SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide” as a strong link resource.  What they offered was the ability to choose a unique name (i.e. www,leapfish.com/YourCompany) and have your Twitter and Facebook feeds stream on your page. Plus, you could add your videos from YouTube, photos and your products or services with complete keyword-rich descriptive text. Unfortunately, Leapfish closed their doors last week and their website is no more.

Leapfish had a healthy Google Page Rank so it could have been a great resource for backlinks to your website. Their advertising model left a lot to be desired in that they sold keywords for a one-time fee, which was renewable every year for $50. An advertiser might pay anywhere from $100 to many thousands of dollars for particular keywords. The promise was that if a keyword search was performed on their site and you owned those keywords, your ad would appear at the top of the search results page. It was kind of a Google ad play except there was no bidding for position.  You bought it once and owned the 1-2 or 3rd. position on the page.

Learn from the Leapfish demise

This is a perfect example of why your offsite SEO needs to be an ongoing effort.  Search Engine Optimization is not a one-time set it & forget it exercise, it should be something that you do on a consistent basis.  The online world changes every day and oftentimes these changes can affect your marketing strategy.  Companies (even big companies) come and go and their popularity is as fleeting as the seasons.  Can you say MySpace?

It is challenging enough just to keep pace with the ever-changing Google algorithm, but making Google happy is only part of the equation. The things we do offsite play a significant part in determining our rank in search results and ultimately the traffic to our website.  Why believe it or not, you could write a book about this stuff icon smile Kindle & Leapfish the times they are a changing!

Read more...

The Case for Building Backlinks

If you don’t have links pointing to your website, Google will not take your site seriously. PERIOD!  In other words, if no other website on the Internet sees value in linking to your site, Google will virtually ignore you.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, the core metric used to establish the value of a website were the number of links pointing to it.  Their theory was simply that links were essentially votes for a site’s significance.  If you had 100 websites dealing with blue widgets, the site with the most links had to be the best site about blue widgets.

Remember, this is an automated process; a software robot (or spider) crawls a web page and follows every link emanating from that page. There is no human interaction, no site judging panel that decides which blue widget site is the best. The Google algorithm ranks a site’s value using hundreds of parameters that include everything from compliant HTML, the age of the domain, proper SEO, external links and dozens of other weighted factors.

Links pointing to your website are still extremely important.  In fact, it is rumored that although Google provides a method for site submission, they prefer to discover your website by following a link from another site.  Links are very cheap insurance that contribute to your ranking in search results.

How to get quality backlinks

To obtain links by hand is a grueling, time consuming process. To get links via an automated submission tool is no longer effective and in some instances can actually hamper your efforts. Face it, you need backlinks and you need a reliable process to achieve good results. If you are looking for a cost-effective way of building quality backlinks, watch this video.

If you have read my book or attended one of my seminars you already know how important links are for improving search results and generating traffic. Find out what hundreds one-way links can do for your website?

Read more...

Content or links – which comes first?

A reader made a comment on a previous post and asked some great questions that I’m sure many of you have, so I thought I’d answer his questions in this post.  Bob wrote…

What do you think of the Bluehost deals for SEO? I just signed up for their $99/month service for one keyword. They will put a 4 page wordpress site up for me and start creating links to it. They do 3 keywords for $199.

I’m reading SEO for Dummies now and may get your ebook as well. Am I better off writing my own keyword-rich content (or hiring freelancers to do it on Fiverr, iFreelance,etc) and learning to do links myself. I have plenty of time and little money. Thanks,

Bob, you asked some excellent questions and believe it or not, you’re already doing some ‘off-site’ SEO by asking your question here and including a link to your site in the comment form.

You said that you have “plenty of time and little money”, which is a common problem many of us share. If that is the case, spending $99 or $199 per month for links is not a good idea…yet.  Let me explain…

In the most recent Google algorithm update a few months ago, they targeted sites that had very little content, or redundant content. Hundreds of thousands of websites virtually disappeared from the Google index, or found themselves on page 98,000.

We need to remember that Google’s goal is to provide what it believes are the best results for a particular search query. A website with little or no content will not rank well regardless of the number or quality of links pointing to it. So, that should answer your question about Bluehost’s linking deal.

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, Bob, I would strongly encourage you to get a copy of my book before you start paying for links or any other SEO services. In my book, I discuss basic page design and critical SEO factors that you need to include, and I hate to tell you that your site is not scoring well at this moment.

‘Local Search’ is one of Google top initiatives and the only piece of information on your page is a phone number. Unfortunately, that phone number is part of a graphic and Google can’t see that your phone number is area code 650.

You have two images on the page and your primary logo image is named, “he_logo.jpg”. Renaming that image to something such as, “san_mateo_electric.jpg” would give Google more information to index.

The only text on your entire page is www.HillsboroughElectric.com and that doesn’t give Google enough information to display your site in results for any search query.

As to creating content for your website, I would encourage you to do this personally before you consider outsourcing.  Nobody knows your business or industry as well as you, so share that information on your site.

Once you feel that you have the basics covered, feel free to outsource, but know that you will need to rewrite almost everything you get from such a source. With the exception of some excellent talent in the Philippines, most outsource firms employ people where English is a second language and most articles will read that way.

Bob, you’re on the right track, but you need to do things in the proper order. You don’t want links before you have some content posted. In fact, you really don’t want to do anything proactively until your site can stand on its own explaining who you are, what you do and where you’re located.

My book, the SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide was written with people like you in mind. People who know they need a website, but can’t afford to hire a professional firm and are not sure where to start or what to do. This is why I offer a “No questions asked guarantee!”  If my book doesn’t meet your expectations – get your money back.  Just one idea could make you thousands!  But, I want you to take 60 days to review my book and decide if this information isn’t worth much more than the cover price.  With no risk, you have nothing to lose!

Best of luck to you, my friend and thanks for taking the time to comment on this blog.

PS: I love the look of your site so far and the pic, now you need to feed Google with a bunch of keyword-rich text.

PPS: If you need links, how about 650 one-way links…see this.

Read more...

Social Bookmarking Tool for Offsite SEO

If you recall, in my book I talked about using OnlyWire as an automated social bookmarking tool. Such tools will send your message to the web’s most popular social networks. There are numerous services like this available, and here’s another one that I think you will really like.

It’s called IMAutomator and it offers some features that are quite powerful. As an example once you paste the URL in the appropriate box, the tool will go to that page and extract all the pertinent information; Title, Description and Keywords.

Another great feature is the ability to choose how frequently you want the page bookmarked. You can choose 1 day, 15 days or spread over 45 days to simulate a more natural bookmarking sequence.  Here’s a video that shows you how to use IMAutomator.

Oh, did I mention these are both free services? Unlike OnlyWire, you don’t need to have active accounts with IMAutomator, they use their own accounts to bookmark your pages.  My recommendation is that you use both services as frequently as possible and double your chances of gaining new visitors and ‘one-way’ link juice.

Read more...

Visit also our social profiles:

Scroll to top